Smile CSV Scraper for FreeAgent and Xero

Are you happy with your bank? I am. I use Smile and they're five-nines awesome - I heartily recommend them to anyone who banks in the UK. The real killer feature - their ethical policy as part of the Co-operative Bank - something all commercial banks should have in my opinion.

One thing they don't do though, is allow you to export your statements in any kind of format - which is kind of a pain for users of services like FreeAgent or Xero as it makes it hard to reconcile your banking transactions. I resorted to copy-pasting the data from the table and reworking the CSV by hand - a bit of a drag to say the least.

No more!

That continued until last week, when I saw a tweet about Aral Balkan's CSV scraper for his HSBC statements - a similar problem, which made me wonder if the code could be converted to work on the Smile statements.

Luckily, Aral is generous enough to share his scraper code under a Creative Commons license, so I got to work and came up with this:

You can view the source if you want to see what's going on, my comments aren't as entertaining as Aral's I'm afraid but it should be easy enough to see how it works. The first part of the file is just includes, the real code starts at line 323.

Credits & licensing

Really all I've done here is take Aral's work and make a few tweaks, so huge kudos to him for not only coming up with the idea but also being cool enough to share the fruits of his labour under a permissive license.

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